Article

Creating a list of albums in iTunes

By Jerrod H. ● Thursday, June 29, 2006

Ask iLounge offers readers the opportunity to get answers to their iPod-, iPhone-, iPad-, iTunes-, or Apple TV-related questions from a member of the iLounge editorial team. We'll answer several questions here each week, and of course, you can always get help with more immediate concerns from the iLounge Discussion Forums. Submit your questions for consideration using our Ask iLounge Submit Form. We reserve the right to edit questions for grammar, spelling, and length.

Q: Is there an easy way to create/export a list of individual albums available by genre from iTunes? For instance, I want to generate a list of all the jazz albums I own, but I can’t figure out a good way to do it. If I export all my jazz albums into a text file, it spits out everything including each song and wraps it around.

- Matt

A: Sure - iTunes’ Printing functionality can do exactly this, and make it look great, too!

To begin, create a Smart Playlist that contains all of your “Jazz” albums. This will work: Genre - Contains - “Jazz”

Next, give this playlist a title, and highlight it in iTunes’ Source column so that it’s the active selection.

Then, go to iTunes’ “File” menu and select “Print.”

In the first set of settings, change the selection to “Album Listing” and choose a theme below (“List of Albums” sounds most like what you want, in this case).

Then, simply hit “Print…” to send the list to the printer. If you’d like to retain an electronic copy, try using a PDF generator like the one built into MacOS X’s “Print” dialog box, or like CutePDF (Free) or Adobe Acrobat on the PC.